


Nathan Hates Max

by longnoideatime



Category: Life Is Strange (Video Game)
Genre: Crying, Explicit Language, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Mental Health Issues, Mental Instability, One Shot, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-15
Updated: 2019-08-15
Packaged: 2020-09-01 10:55:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20256961
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/longnoideatime/pseuds/longnoideatime
Summary: Takes place in a time bubble with little impact on other events. Nathan POV in one shot scene between him and Max, sometime after he's pissed Jefferson off but before he's left Max the voicemail she gets belatedly.





	Nathan Hates Max

**Author's Note:**

> Everybody probably a little OOC. M for Language. I'm bad at titles; mea culpa.

Nathan hates Max. He tests the phrase out, rolling it around on the roof of his mouth to see if he likes the way it feels before spitting it out.

He couldn’t have been her. Even if he’d been born in the exact same circumstances. There was something rotting inside him that would always give itself away before too long, this stench of dead flowers left too long in a vase that would leak out from beneath his skin if the voices hissing in his head didn’t escape to whisper around him first. People tended to notice you were fucked when they could only hear half your conversation, even the stupidest assholes. They tended to flinch back when your halves of the conversation were as disturbing as his.

He prefers to be six feet under, and fuck but the drugs don’t take him close. She’s kind of like him in that way, hiding behind her painfully fucking shy façade — Maybe he can’t call it a façade when it’s at least partially true, but it’s so goddamn irritating to watch her shuffling along the walls like a fish trying to hide in a reef and forgetting it’s all these stupid colours that can be seen from space. What was his point again? Oh yeah: Cockfield is a bitch, using her nosiness to peek around the edges of other people’s lives because she’s too afraid of her own.

She’s better than him though. He has to remind himself of that, beating the sides of his head to knock it back in there, although it does nothing to stem the tide of words rising ready to sting like hornets, this inescapable buzz of thoughts he can’t get rid of that will sting him here and there until his brain swells into a salmon-coloured smoothie and drips out his ears. Then he’ll be dead though, which— He snorts a line of the uncut shit he got from Frank —might not be such a bad thing.

He’s spent years being such a sensitive little cunt — he can hear the way his father says the same if he really tries, imitates the man alone with no one to laugh at his impression but then his eyes tear up of their own volition when he hears his father’s voice issue out of his mouth instead of his own. He wipes them angrily, so his eyes sting with the force of it — He’s fucking sick of feeling things to such a _useless_ fucking degree.

Victoria— Victoria tells him not to rub so much at his eyes, that he’ll rip his eyelashes off and they grow slowly. Numb, if he could just be numb to it all it’d be so much better. But then he’s been that way before too and it’s terrifying in its emptiness. It’s like drowning, but without the pressure; there’s water that’s outside of every part of you and then it’s filled every part of you too, all these spaces that should contain something human, but instead it’s just water, lifeless and cold. He wipes his eyes again to clear the new tears that have fallen and sniffs in in one huge swallow of snot and air, his thin chest curving into a bow with it.

He catches a glimpse of himself in the mirror, red-eyed and reedy, dressed in nothing but his boxers, the scar on his ribs fat with how many times he’s knifed over it. He snorts and looks away, his reflection as dismissive of him as he is of it, their curly blonde hair falling further forward over their faces. How much had his dad paid to buy him a spot on the fucking football team? He gave as little of a shit about them as they did him. He opens his mouth testingly in front of the mirror and his father’s voice comes out again even as his jaw doesn’t move, that voice packing his throat so tightly he starts to choke. He claws at himself, his nails leaving red trails of blood down his skin, the image in the mirror standing still, and then he throws a punch, his hand cracking or the glass cracking, he’s not sure which.

There are fat shards of mirror glass on the floor, his knuckles bloody; he runs his fingers over them, and there’s no pain but he can’t move two of his fingers. Mark has told him over and over again that he doesn’t know how to throw a punch; _he_ does, but his demonstrations so far just feel like being beaten for his sins. You find your way out from beneath the knuckles of one god only to realise you’ve wandered deeper into hell and knelt to another. Nathan leaves the slivers of himself that stare reproachfully in the glass and settles cross-legged onto the floor before his bed, picking his phone up. Blood gets on his screen as he tries to text, and he wipes it away, not paying attention to the thin red streaks left behind.

Crackfield bursts into his room not ten minutes later, a fire extinguisher in hand. He looks at the floor behind her to see half of his doorknob lying like a dead thing on the ground.

“Jesus fuck!” He brushes past her, her expression of surprise painfully naïve as he looks up and down the hall to be sure no one heard her _take his fucking doorknob off with a fire extinguisher_. There’s no one, and he closes the door before that can change. “Do they not know about knocking in Pixie Hipster land?”

The surprise on her little freckled face is slowly turning to defensive ire. “I got a text saying you’d be killed if I didn’t come.”

He lights up a cigarette, eyeing her over the end of the flame; he’s pretty sure she’s too angry and confused to notice the way his hands are shaking. “And you came? Yourself? I’m touched.”

She snorts, crossing her arms over her chest. “_Clearly_.”

He chooses to let that one go, the tone that was the end of Rachel’s voicemail one continuous note undercutting his thoughts. He remembers before they shut off her phone, the exact way she sounded over each word; he used to call after she’d gone. He scoffs at himself, bitter and angry, his thumb rubbing over the cuts on his opposite hand and pressing down, _hard_: fuck him, saying it like she had any fucking choice.

“Nathan?” Her. He forgot about her for a moment. He looks at her and he can see her eyes on his hand, his nakedness (her cheeks become the faintest pink beneath her freckle-spangled skin), his throat. The bruises courtesy of Gayram. His legs begin to jangle, and he’s not even taking his fucking medication anymore.

He expects her pity when he dares a look at her through the smoke he exhales, but she’s wearing none. It’s good, he thinks briefly, his thoughts slow and lumbrous as they stumble around the inside of his (mostly empty, and yet not nearly empty enough) head. If she doesn’t pity him, maybe all of this will be easier for her. Then again she did come running to save him like his own lameass white knight.

She’s irritated that he hasn’t answered yet, but there’s an edge of uncertainty hidden there beneath the anger, one waiting to slice him or maybe her if either of them get too close. She opens her mouth on a rebuke — that’s what it is, he can see these things — and he sucks in a sharp inhale on his cigarette as if he might speak and sate her curiosity, crossing to the ashtray coincidentally closer to her than him before he releases all of his smoke-scented breath over her, stubbing out his cigarette at the same time.

She coughs and waves a delicate hand in front of her face; the fragile bones in her wrist look so goddamn breakable to him. “God, you’re an ass.”

He pulls his eyes up to hers and those blue lenses in her face flare wider, as if she didn’t expect him to look at her directly. Fucking n00b. “And you’re a dumb little virgin too stupid not to go running into some guy’s room in the middle of the night.”

She’s so disgusted he’d be offended if he didn’t agree with her. If even Mysterious Max, the Noir Angel of Blackwell, thinks you’re an irredeemable piece of shit, what actual **_fucking filth_** you must be. “Is that what this is about, Nathan?”

He laughs so long he starts to worry if he’ll be able to stop, his breathlessness making him stagger as he tries to find the couch, sitting heavily as the last of his chuckles subside, and his body feels so limp without them animating him it could dissolve into the floor. The hell was even funny? She looks like she can’t decide between calling an ambulance or the door, but who the fuck is the nosy princess kidding? She wants to know what he knows, and part of her even wants to know what he wants. _Is that what this is about Nathan? _No._ **Yes. **You want to do to her what you did to all of the other ones. _He hadn’t done that to them. Fucking Christ, even Jefferson hadn’t done that to them. _Can you really be sure though? How much do you remember about the night Rachel died? How much do you remember about any of them? _

His hands twitch without anything to hold on to. No gun. No cigarettes. Why did he even want Caulfield here? He pours out another line on the coffee table before his bed, although he has to shake his hands out they’re shaking so badly before he can get it in any kind of shape.

“Cereally? Nathan, I’m leaving.”

He lurches to his feet without the drugs — _fucking bitch_, **he needed those** — his arm reaching past her to close the door, caging her in between his body and her escape. She’s not as frightened as she should be when she turns and looks up at him, breathing like a wounded animal as he tries to shift through his scrambled thoughts and remember what’s real. Is Mark coming for her here? Is that why he texted her? No, no it’s not that, not yet.

“I needed to talk to you— I needed to tell you—” Unexpectedly he feels his eyes prickle with tears; for fucking Cockfield? For himself? He blinks furiously and hopes she doesn’t notice. “You can’t show up like this. When someone texts you, you can’t just run to where they tell you.”

She’s incandescently incredulous. “You texted me to make me show up here, to tell me not to show up here? Wowser. I’m leaving Nathan. Get out of my way or I’ll kill you.” She hits his chest when she says that and he realises she is afraid he’ll try to do something. _Not me._

He steps back and throws his arms wide, like Napoleon inviting the opposition troops to do their fucking best. She looks at him like he’s lost his mind, which is a fucking lie when the whole school knows he never fucking had any grip on it to begin with. _Twitch. Tweak. Loser._ “I’m right here.” He lets his arms fall, banging into his sides, before lighting another cigarette. “Better hurry though.”

“What does that mean, Nathan?” She uses his name too often; she thinks he’s rabid and he’ll forget without it.

“I’m trying to fucking tell you, but you can’t shut up for five fucking minutes,” he snarls. She’s so quiet though, why did he think she was talking? He slams his fist against the wall, the wave of pain that washes over him so unexpected his thoughts reorder themselves. For a moment. “Call the police next time you get a text like that, okay? It’s not safe for you.”

“Because you ‘know where I sleep’?” Her eyes are challenging, but all he can do is look at her in response, his eyes gone dark as his want spills out of him at the words. He knows where she sleeps. _You know where she sleeps._

He brushes her hair back from her face with his hand still holding the lit cigarette, the glowing end so near to her unblemished skin. “I’m sorry I can’t show you what that fucking pussy Gayram is doing wrong, gorgeous.” He lets go of her and takes another drag. “I’m not long for this world.”

Her eyes trace down the visible scars on his forearms, gone pale over the last few years.

He snorts. “No, not like that. I stared too long into the abyss.” His smoke is dead, burnt down to the filter with the restless way he’s been puffing on it. He throws it into the ashtray besides the other one and takes his seat on his couch again, his arms across the back of it like it’s a throne, the corner of his lips pulled up into a mirthless smile. Exactly the sort of throne someone like him deserves, some shitty old futon. “And now it’s come to devour me.”

She stares at him so hard he expects to spontaneously combust. “…Can you maybe not talk in stupid riddles all night?”

He laughs, genuinely, head thrown back, the whole fucking shebang. “How the fuck else would you know that underneath all this I’m really just an insecure mentally ill fuck? I’ve got to let the viewers know I’m tortured.”

“_How ‘bout torture then?_”

“What?” He’s sitting forward, his heart jumping in his chest.

Max moves cautiously into his room, clearly expecting sand traps or a jack in the box to pop up or some shit. She lowers her body next to his as his eyes watch her unblinkingly, too fixed, too interested, for her to feel comfortable beneath the weight of them. The drugs have made them darker, his pupils bleeding across his iris, obscuring the unremarkable blue. Her eyes aren’t like that; even when she was more of a chickenshit, before she decided she couldn’t just stay away from the bony skeletal hands of death — those sexy goddamn things with their rattling fingers — they were still so sharp. Not in a mean way, or even in a not mean way — They were kind of like nature, aware of everything, and maybe life giving, but not really cruel or kind, too removed.

“I didn’t say anything,” she’s saying gently. He stops looking at her eyes so he can hear her, her hand on his shoulder — Why is it so fucking cold? — making his skin involuntarily flinch.

She notices, and moves as if to pull away, but he traps her fingers within his own, holding on to them so tightly he realises it must be painful, but she lets him for some reason. He thinks about Sam and her broken ribs.

“I think you should go to the hospital.”

He shakes his head but doesn’t pull away from her. “I’ll be dead before the party. The drugs aren’t much of a concern with that in mind, Mad Max.” He lets her fingers slip from his as he rummages beneath his bed for the bottle of alcohol he knows he has. He doesn’t remember what it is; something brown and strong he stole from his father just to prove he could. He prefers drinks that taste less like antiquated masculinity and more like fire.

His fingers expertly unscrew the cap and she covers the mouth with her hand; a dangerous proposition. He gives her one second, raising his eyebrow and waiting for her to say something worth interrupting his love affair. He thinks drugs might be the only things he’s ever truly loved; it’d sound sad that he was dying that way if he was a weepy whiny bitch, but there were plenty of people older than him who must’ve thought the same.

“Did you actually see that movie?” she asks.

He eases the bottle from beneath her fingers and takes a sip, smiling against the lip. “I’m a skinny, slightly more weasel-faced version of Jared Leto who uses my family’s wealth and reputation as a means of forcing connections I have no idea how to form on my own. I’ve seen all the movies.”

She takes the bottle when he offers it to her and pours half of it out into an already dead plant. He’s not entirely sure when he even got a plant, but he’s sure it’s not nearly as appreciative of the booze as he would have been. “You’re oddly self-aware tonight,” she comments, handing it back to him as if she’s done him a favour.

“Death will do that to a man.” He tries to drink the remaining half and she knocks it out of his hand, bourbon or some other rich old man drink spilling across him and the couch. He shoves her down into the couch, rage pulsing through him like a second heartbeat, and it feels good that she looks angry too, like pouring lemon juice on a cut.

“Stop saying you’re dying!” She shoves at him, but he’s not in the mood to be moved, feeding off her desperation as she struggles beneath him.

“Oh yeah? Gonna miss me, are you?” He nips her earlobe and she knees him near the groin, shoving him off her.

“No, you asshole. Kate almost died, and I just— I don’t want anybody else to die. Even you.”

His door slams behind her on her way out.

“_Max, It's... It's Nathan. I just wanted to say... I'm sorry. I didn't want to hurt Kate or Rachel, or... didn't wanted to hurt anybody. Everybody... used me. Mr. Jefferson... is coming for me now. All this shit will be over soon. Watch out, Max... He wants to hurt you next. Sorry_.”


End file.
